Kynaeus wrote: » Hi, I'm just starting to look into how I can get my A+ certification and I'm rather confused. Plenty of places seem to offer courses for training to pass the exam and include vouchers for the test itself, but I don't understand where I actually take the exam. I haven't been able to find anything about it's location either and I was wondering if anyone can answer what I'm sure is probably a very silly question. Thanks!
humble2007 wrote: » I did mine through Vue. I found that their locations had better times (plus I was able to get a discounted voucher through them). They also have a lot of locations and you can browse locations by going to their website too, just like prometric.
Kynaeus wrote: » Yeesh, the Prometric site just led me in a loop for finding a test site. Maybe they just hate Canada. Vue was quite helpful though and the sites are only a few km from me, thanks a bunch Humble My other question was about the updated exam, most of the practice exams or questions I came across seem to ask about a lot of (what I hate to describe as) obsolete equipment, like RJ11 hook-ups, serial parallel ports, SCSI drives, and other dated equipment like Pentium MMX processors and the introduction of L2 caches, etc. Stuff from pre-2000. IS this just because I'm taking the free stuff and more up-to-date practice you need to pay for?
humble2007 wrote: » I took the test last year and it was the 2006 version so I had a lot of this stuff. They have a new version of the test that I thought was supposed to get rid of a lot of that stuff but I can't speak for sure as I have not even looked at the objectives for it. It could just be that there is no free material yet for the new exam . (Which is surprising, because when I say new exam, it is still a year old.) The things you mentioned in your post don't seem completely old to me, with the exception of the Pentium MMX processors. In todays world you can still easily work with RJ11, Serial/Parallel ports, SCSI, and L2 cache still exists just as much today as it did back in pre 2000, we just have more of it now. Maybe you should buy a book that specializes in the 2009 A+. I also always recommend a product called Transcender, it has a lot of practice questions which not only helps you assess where your at, but it provides detailed information about why one answer is wrong and another is right. Expecting to get a cert for free just isn't a very wise move. They can be very expensive, but the end result should make you more money. They are still typically cheaper than a college class. When I first started preparing I didn't have a ton of money and bought very little. For A+ the only thing I bought was transcender (for $70, got a discount from the school bookstore) and the exam vouchers ($144 total for both tests, again I got a discount because my school was a VUE testing center). I refused to spend any more, yet I never thought twice about taking a $400 class that requires a $100 book. And my college is cheap, some of these colleges can charge $1000-$1500 for a class and you could have easily learned the same or more by using a good book paired with transcender.
Kynaeus wrote: » I didn't mean to imply that they were totally disused, just that the L2 cache was introduced like twelve years ago, serial/parallel ports are replaced on most new devices for USB ports, that kind of thing. I was more surprised that there were no questions regarding newew technology like hyper-threading, 64-bit processors & operating systems, etc. and by no means do I think I can do this for free! I was just doing some practice questions to see how much work I should do before taking the test
